Appar­ently, they’re releas­ing the source code for RealPlayer (Linux ver­sion) some­time in the near future.  Whilst bina­ries of this have been avail­able for some time (Real has been one of few major soft­ware ven­dors to com­mit to long term sup­port of such a plat­form, which has been excel­lent — I won’t com­ment on the OTHER issues sur­round­ing their soft­ware, but their cross-platform thing has been good).

Their Helix Com­mu­nity (Helix Player) project has been around and open­sourced for some time (under the terms of their own license, the RPSL), but there is now talk and a sug­ges­tive line on the web­site which would imply that Real are likely to release the source to their flag­ship prod­uct, RealPlayer.  “Com­ing soon.” is the offi­cial line next to the RealPlayer down­load link on http://player.helixcommunity.org — not that it mat­ters much, because appar­ently the Helix Player now sup­ports OGG, a hand­ful of Real’s for­mats (that being the thing which they had pre­vi­ously held as pro­pri­etry and hadn’t been sup­ported by the Helix prod­uct tree), as well as MPEGs plus a few mil­lion other weird and won­der­ful media for­mats.  I haven’t seen any­thing indi­cat­ing with any great cer­tainty whether the RealAudio/Video and stream­ing for­mats are cov­ered by this license, how­ever this page would sug­gest that per­haps they have been…  it seems like a com­pletely unvi­able busi­ness direc­tion to take, espe­cially com­ing from a firm with some­thing of a his­tory of not so consumer-focused prod­ucts (read: spyware).

Their encod­ing prod­ucts have always been really easy to use, and just gen­er­ally rocked, and I’m hop­ing that this move doesn’t affect that.